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A01=Margaret Schabas
adam smith
agency
Author_Margaret Schabas
capital
Category=KCA
Category=KCZ
century
contemporary
david hume
economics
economist
economy
enlightenment
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eq_business-finance-law
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era
french
historian
historical
history
john stuart mill
laws
legal
litigation
market
marketplace
modern
natural
neoclassical
philosopher
philosophical
philosophy
science
social
study
thomas malthus
time period
Product details
- ISBN 9780226735702
- Weight: 369g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 01 Oct 2007
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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References to the economy are ubiquitous in modern life, and virtually every facet of human activity has capitulated to market mechanisms. In the early modern period, however, there was no common perception of the economy, and discourses on money, trade, and commerce treated economic phenomena as properties of physical nature. Only in the early nineteenth century did economists begin to posit and identify the economy as a distinct object, divorcing it from natural processes and attaching it exclusively to human laws and agency. In "The Natural Origins of Economics", Margaret Schabas traces the emergence and transformation of economics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from a natural to a social science. Focusing on the works of several prominent economists - David Hume, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill - Schabas examines their conceptual debt to natural science and thus locates the evolution of economic ideas within the history of science. An ambitious study, "The Natural Origins of Economics" will be of interest to economists, historians, and philosophers alike.
Margaret Schabas is professor in and head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia.
